2007 was the second full year I lived in Vancouver. It was a year of settling in deeper, exploring, new friendships, and personal growth.

WorkLux Delux has continued its steady growth. It got a few major updates throughout the year, and the amount of new maps has been delightful. Work on the next generation Sillysoft game proceeded in bursts, but I haven't been committed to it hard-core. I decided against renting office space and hiring full-time employees in Vancouver. Lux has attracted an amazing array of online people that have played key roles in driving Sillysoft's success. In 2008 I need to focus more on how to enable and manage an online team. I like the virtual office setup, but it's been hard for me to maintain a consistent work ethic within it.

Media & PublishingI made 143 blog posts in 2007. That's a slight 3 more then the 140 from 2006. I started making random links posts (30 total) as a way to keep track of interesting sites and spread the word. I continued to work on my photography and have clearly made progress. I've settled into flickr as a stable platform to host my photos.

Video production is something that I want to get back into more in 2008. Video is the most powerful medium, and Youtube has blown the publishing field wide-open. Vancouverites come talk to me if you're interested in making videos. Witness the bicycle revolution at hand in my Critical Mass Video.

It was February when I gave in and joined Facebook. I use it regularly now as a tool and game. I still keep my photos and blog outside of fb, on the internet-at-large, but fb is aware of it. My instinct is to be against walled-in gardens like fb, but I realize the utility it provides as a communications and networking medium.

TravelI hit up Montreal for Vaganza 7 near the start of the year. I traveled to the Okanagan and down the US West Coast with my brother in March. I biked to Bowen Island in May. At the end of the summer I traveled into the mountains for Shambhala and connected with my spirituality. In the fall I flew east for a back-to-back wedding tour of Montreal and Toronto, my old haunts. I ended the year with another trip to Ontario to see family and celebrate the Festivus holidays.

Looking Forward to 20082007 was a huge year for me, and I'm happy with the direction I'm headed. I'm looking forward to continuing it in 2008, and pushing further. To explore more of Vancouver, including the surrounding islands and mountains. To grow the bonds of friendship that I've formed, and make even more. To manifest a happy and magical existence for myself in the world. 2008, let's boogie...

I moved to Vancouver on January 7th, 2006. The start of the year was filled with finding a place to live and getting myself set up here. I was working on American History Lux at the time, but it got pushed aside a bit as I explored Vancouver. It's a pretty vibrant city (moreso then some people here think), and I partook in Moose Camp (and was captured on GETV b-roll), a meeting of the pillow fight club, some sessions of Manhunt, and the critical mass bike parade. All that and more in the first months of the year.

Work on Lux Delux continued in spurts throughout the year. The plugins were put on better display, divided into categories, and better Map of the Week awards were added. Lux was released in retail stores in Germany (looks like I forgot to post about that), and got an interface re-design. I started a 2006 in review page on the Sillysoft Wiki that lists the exact dates of various 2006 happenings in Luxtopia.

October hosted the third annual Luxtoberfest Contest and Celebration. It was the biggest and best yet, and I don't know how we can top it next year. Afterwards I got myself set up with a new MacBook Pro as my main computer. Sillysoft popped out a little Devil's Brigade Lux game, commissioned by some TV people. I set up the fast news website Hot Grog on a lark - I plan to do some more with it in the future.

Ancient Empires Lux was being worked on throughout the last half on the year, and was released in December. Shortly after that I took off for a family holiday down to Central America, and then Christmas in Toronto. I came back to Vancouver for New Year's, and that's the end of 2006. It was a good year. I started settling into Vancouver, did some traveling, and kept up the growth of Sillysoft. Now on to 2007!

Marketing guru Seth Godin wrote up The 8 Free Things Every Site Should Do. The top item that I hadn't done was to create a Squidoo lens. Now I know that Seth owns Squidoo, and putting it so high on the list is probably him pimping it. Still, he is a very successful guru. Squidoo works on a first-come first-served basis for keywords, which get used as the URL for the lens. I've been having fun in my goal to conquer "dustin" on the internet, so set up a lens on Dustin, which catalogs some famous Dustins. Plus I tossed up a Risk Game lens for business.

Feedback for Squidoo: - There was a flickr feature there, but what I really wanted to do was show a photostream of all photos tagged with 'dustin' from all of Flickr. That would be a cool feature to add. - Uploading a PNG with transparency didn't work properly in the intro (OSX 10.4, Firefox 2 beta). - I would like a preference to turn off ads on my lenses.

I was quoted in a USA TODAY article that was just published. My thoughts are pretty inconsequential to the piece (written about Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz's blog), but it mentions my name and Sillysoft (and Vancouver), so that's pretty cool.

How did this happen? Well, I read Schwartz's blog (since my business is pretty heavily tied to Java I like to keep up-to-date with the big picture going on at Sun) and occasionally comment like the opinionated guy that I am. On May 22 I got an email from the USA TODAY article's author. He was contacting some people who had posted comments on Schwartz's blog with some questions he had. I whipped off a reply the next day and forgot about it. Then today voila, the article popped up in the Google alert I have set up for "sillysoft".

It was done by Shane Neville, one of the presenters of the DIY Distribution session that I went to a little while ago. Shane has a pretty interesting blog that I have enjoyed poking around, so I'm happy to be on it. When I saw this wicked awesome T shirt he posted about a while ago I immediately ordered myself one.

Also, I feel the need to link to Cliffski, because I found this deliciously funny:

He lives in Canada (fantastic place), and he's smiling in his blog profile picture.I live in the UK, and I'm brandishing a dagger in mine.That tells you everything you need to know about the quality of life in those two countries.

Back at last year's IndieGamesCon I attended a good session on marketing from Kelly Heckman. In it she talked about building up a brand for your company, for your products, and for yourself as a person. The last item is what concerns me at the moment.

Having a weblog is an excellent way to build up your 'personal brand'. Unfortunately, I think that sillytech was hampering this somewhat. It's a group blog, and even though I have a page there to myself, it's not really mine. So I decided to start a personal blog that's all my own. Actually, I decided to take the sillytech code and create a personal skin that uses the same content database, but only shows my stuff. So nothing will change at sillytech, however I now also have a blog that's just for me. From now on I'm going to be spending my efforts building up Dustin Sacks' blog instead of sillytech.

The design is still a first version. I know I need a better picture of myself, and I want to put my blogroll up also. Any other comments you have on the design or layout or colors are appreciated.

Gil has been posting some more in his bloggy thang recently, which is cool. Of course, he's going away for a while (6.5 weeks!), so who knows what will happen. Recently I've heard some more stories from the year he spent kibbutzing and it interests me greatly. I'll likely never embark on such ventures, so a retelling is as good as it can get.

Anyway, the true reason for this post (apart from the fact I couldn't fall asleep) was that Gil posted a rock awesome picture from a while back. It's so cool that I feel the need to steal it and repost it here.